Five nations signed an agreement yesterday to set up a European Gendarmerie Force (EGF) that would offer paramilitary support for international peacekeeping missions.
Ministers said the 3,000-strong force would tackle a damaging shortfall in recent peacekeeping operations by backing up military efforts to enforce public order, fight crime and train local police in the wake of a crisis.
"This force will become an important capability, bridging the gap between military forces and civil police," Dutch Defense Minister Henk Kamp said.
The force should be operational next year. It will include elements from the French gendarmes, Italian Carabinieri and their equivalents in Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands.
The EGF will have a core of 800 to 900 members ready to deploy within 30 days and a pool of 2,300 reinforcements on standby. It will be headquartered in Vicenza in northeastern Italy.
Defense ministers from the five nations signed the agreement to set up the force on the sidelines of a meeting with their colleagues from all 25 EU nations. The other EU countries will not participate because they do not have such paramilitary police.
"We will keep it open to other countries that don't yet have gendarme forces but may want to join later," said French Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie, who first suggested the idea of the European force last year.
Following experiences with peacekeeping in the Balkans, European planners say gendarme units are increasingly necessary. The need was highlighted in March, when NATO troops were caught unaware by mob violence in Kosovo that left 19 people dead.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema